High on survival

A former addict who has charted his crime-ridden life now advises government, and counts Prince Charles as his greatest influence. He tells Alison Benjamin of his transition from drug abuser to policy maker

Mark Johnson is buzzing. He is on a mission to explain his new role advising policy makers how drug addicts and young offenders can be turned round. The excitement he once only experienced when anticipating his next fix of heroin is palpable as he talks about the one-to-one supporter scheme he is setting up. It will match ex-offenders, like himself who have broken the cycle of offending, stopped taking drugs, have got jobs and families and are living successfully in society, with young people in custody.

The day before we meet, Johnson, 36, has been proselytising about the scheme at the probation service's centenary conference. Drawing on his experience in Portland Young Offenders Institute and Onley YOI, he says: "Our society says you pay for a crime by serving time, so when you're in prison you have all the best intentions. I'm sick of letting my mum down, I'm sick of letting my girlfriend down, I'm sick of letting my kids down all the time. I'm going to get a job and I'm going to go straight. But as soon as I step out the door, that same society stigmatises me as an ex-prisoner and I can't get a job. For a young person, when you've got the peer group which has its arms open (but inside those arms is drugs, escalating drugs use, crime, da, da, da, da, da), what are they going to do? It's easier to go back into a life of crime than step up and take part in society."

Johnson's own descent into a world of drug-fuelled crime, addiction and homelessness is compellingly recounted in his book, Wasted, published tomorrow. It's an all too familiar story of a loveless childhood blighted by violence and a damaged adolescent turning to alcohol and drugs. Yet what set this misery memoir apart is not the fact that he came through it and won the 2005 Prince's Trust Young Achiever of the Year Award, but that he is using its lessons to inform government policy. "The book. It's not about me," Johnson stresses. "I'm opening the door for people."

There is an urgency in this voice as he reels off statistics that prove current methods are clearly failing young people, of whom 75% who enter the prison system are reconvicted within two years of release . "So why are we still using them?," asks Johnson. His answer is that the people designing the policies do not understand the nature of the problem. "What they have in qualifications, I have in experience", he says. "I'm here to make that experience the qualification that's needed to design these policies."

Dysfunctional background

"When you've got a healthy background you've got a full landscape of colour and choices," he adds, stretching out his arms. "When you come from dysfunction, it's narrow and there are no choices available. The people with colour can't imagine what it's like to live narrow like that," he says bringing his hands together. "Yet they are making the decisions."

Johnson was one of 25 young ex-offenders - a term he dislikes because "it describes what I did not who I am"- invited by the Prince's Trust president, Prince Charles to a summit on youth crime at Clarence House last December. Over dinner with Home secretary, John Reid, attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, director of probation, Roger Hills and other senior ministers and civil servants, the young people shared their views on how to tackle recidivism. Out of this was born the one-to-one supporter scheme. "How does a young person in custody know it's possible to get a job, a flat and live successfully if they've never met anyone who has?" says Johnson.

He is now employed as a special adviser to the Prince's Trust to pilot the scheme in four YOIs/prisons - Guys Marsh, Channings Wood, Portland, a fourth is being finalised - with inmates aged up to 30. It is deliberately not called a mentoring scheme because Johnson strongly believes that traditional mentoring does not work. "The wrong person is aimed at the wrong person. The stereotypical mentor is a middle aged women, financially secure, whose kids have left home with nothing to do. We know people want to help vulnerable people for a number of reasons. Not always healthy. 'I look at you because it makes me feel better'. There's no training and you're dealing with damaged, vulnerable people with very complicated issues."

In contrast, the Prince's Trust supporters will share similar experiences, are chosen by the young offender and their help could continue indefinitely.

"I'll meet you at the prison's gate. I'll commit to help you get where you need to go," says Johnson. It may sound like a huge commitment, but he points out: "This is not about providing a service. It's about sharing the responsibility with the offenders."

Johnson criticises social workers for failing to make him take responsibility for his actions. "They said I was a product of my environment and upbringing. That made me feel it wasn't my fault, so the last person that I looked at was me and that's the first place I needed to look." In Wasted, the social workers at the first rehab he chose to attend in preference to staying in prison, are described as "kind-hearted but misguided".

"They have tried hard to persuade us to change but as far as I know, they haven't succeeded with any of us," he writes. "Social workers are so far behind," he adds. "Our whole society has changed."

He points to the collapse of apprenticeships. "On the outside it was about employment. But it was really about an older man showing a younger bloke how to live; how to get up at 7am and to emotionally correct his behaviour. That's gone and we're dealing with the wreckage."

Emotional relapse

He describes his own inability to stick to a job. "There were fundamental things missing in my life. I'd just known damage. So I didn't have the mental stability to stay at work. I'd have what I call emotional relapses, or 'fuck it's' [when I thought] why should I go to work and earn £50 when I can steal a pair of trainers? Nobody was showing me how to live life."

Roger Hills was so impressed by the intense young man with the Brummie accent he met at Clarence House, that he has asked him to "bring the user voice" to the probation service by advising the board of directors of the National Probation Service.

As a result, he now sits on his local board in the south west of England and is working with its chair to devise a template to recruit ex-offenders to sit on all the 42 boards across England and Wales. He hopes that many of the one-to-one supporters will become future probation board advisers.

Johnson says it was the faith that Princes Charles placed in him after they met at the young achiever award - which he won for kicking the drugs and setting up with the Prince's Trust's help a successful tree surgery business - that inspired him to get where he is today.

"He trusted me and nobody else had. He gave me that self belief that he was behind me." Johnson wants to see a drastic change in the way we evaluate policies. He is passionate that his recovery after he finally went into long-term intensive rehabilitation should not be counted as a success for just one person. "Where's my peer group now? They've dominoed. Where they used to look up to me as a blagger, and a robber, it's smashed, gone. So there is a huge peer group change. My mother's got a son. My children have got a dad. It's permeated through my community so that one person isn't one person."

To the sceptics and cynics who think the system cannot change, Johnson, who a few years ago was killing himself with drugs, responds. "No one can tell me change isn't possible. Because I shouldn't even be here."